Wikidata and Wikipedia

ASECS 2025, DH Caucus Session

Alice McGrath

2025-04-05

Outline

Overview of Wikidata
Structure of Wikidata statements
Queries and other uses

What is Wikidata?

“A collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation”

“Wikidata”, Wikipedia.org

The Linked Open Data Cloud (view interactive version from lod-cloud.net)

Linked Open Data

The Linked Open Data Cloud

Principles of Linked Data

How does it work?

Concepts

Data should be described in a standardized way
URIs refer to the definition of a data category

Statements

“The sky is blue” = “The sky has the color blue”

Semantic triple:
- Subject - sky
- Predicate - has the color
- Object - blue

Examples

Properties
- Genre: P136
- Gender: P21

What can you do with Wikidata?

The Wikidata API

The game Wikitrivia by Tom J. Watson uses the Wikidata API

Uses

Building open-source web resources
Add data and images easily with digital publishing tools like Juncture
Enhance a dataset: add Wikidata entity IDs to discover more information
Dataset discovery: add identifiers from other data resources to wikidata

Wikidata Queries

Wikidata Query Service– SPARQL Queries
Wikidata Query Builder – GUI

Query structure

Genre queries

Editing Wikidata